West Kent European Movement (WKEM) was established as a branch of the European Movement UK many decades ago.
SSTIE – Sevenoaks Swanley & Tonbridge in Europe was established in 2017 following the 2016 Referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU. It became affiliated with the European Movement UK soon afterwards.
The two groups remained separate despite them both being part of the EM family, and despite them both covering broadly the same geographical areas.
They have had the same aims and objectives but slightly different operating styles. Like many campaigning organisations both groups went very quiet during the pandemic.
But other groups have woken up and are now back out in the big wide world again, and it is probably time that we joined them.
With a view to moving this forward we have taken a number of steps and made some changes.
- WKEM and SSTIE have merged into a single organisation – West Kent for Europe.
- and we have a new logo.
- We now cover the constituencies of Sevenoaks & Swanley and Tonbridge & Malling (as we did before), and we have added Tunbridge Wells (where TWIN is sadly no longer active) and also Dartford (which has had no EM local group).
We are signing up to the EM Membership System. Other EM local groups that have done so have found that there are significant numbers of EM member who were not known to them. We hope that this will also be the case in West Kent.
These EM members that we do not yet have contact with will not of course receive this email, but we will contact them soon.